A curious question comes up for Dave Belden as he talks about the challenges of a stage role that calls on him to perform some of the most formidable classical scores ever written.

Is he an actor who plays the violin or a musician who moonlights as an actor?

“I wish I could tell you,” said Belden, who has been hashing out his part in the play “Charles Ives Take Me Home,” opening at Curious Theatre Company this weekend.

“It’s a constant question, a constant tug-of-war for me.”

Having both skills is clearly a plus in this case; few professional actors could land a job demanding this particular combination. And it’s not just playing — it’s playing in character as a father at odds with his daughter.

The third character in playwright Jessica Dickey’s story is Charles Ives himself, the 20th-century composer who appears as a narrator in the style of the Stage Manager in “Our Town.” Ives wrote a lot of music but is probably best known for his use of dissonance, throwing in notes designed to jar the listener into a zone of discomfort.

The music serves as a metaphor for the action, which can get uncomfortable as the father and daughter wrestle over her career choice. She wants to be a basketball coach, a job he can’t imagine as an artist.

The play is “happy and sad simultaneously” said Belden, who performs parts of Ives’ Violin Sonata No. 4 and other selections, at one point getting a personal tutorial from the late composer himself, played by actor Jim Hunt.

In real life, Belden doesn’t so much need the lesson. He’s a graduate of the Northwestern University School of Music, and makes the bulk of his living as a freelance musician performing with the Chicago Sinfonietta, and other ensembles in his hometown.

He also has a long résumé as an actor, starting when he was a kid and including playing the same role in a recent production of “Charles Ives” at Chicago’s Strawdog Theatre Company.

He plays concerts more than he acts because there tends to be more work, he said, and it pays better. The difference is that musicians follow a composer’s directions precisely, while actors and directors have great leeway interpreting a script.

“As a classical musician I can sit in with an orchestra I’ve never played with before and, over the course of three rehearsals, play anything in the standard repertory. Musicians do this all the time,” Belden said.

But plays need to be developed, even familiar ones. “Everybody has a different idea of how ‘Hamlet’ is going to be produced.”

“Charles Ives Take Me Home,” which is directed by Christy Montour-Larson, has a lot of nuances to work out. Plays about fathers and daughters can easily get bogged down in sentiment. This one relies on tension. It’s not easy to watch, Belden said, but it aims for the truth about how families operate.

“If it induces people to think about the choices parents make and the choices children make and the ways parents and children don’t always see each other, that’s great,” he said.

The presence of Ives drives it home. The composer was the son of a musician himself, and a college athlete. He mediates between the characters’ worlds of arts and sports.

The composer also understood the difficulty in making choices. He wrote in many musical forms and knew how to turn a lovely phrase. But he devoted his life to the challenge of modern classical and paid a price for it. He was ahead of his time, much more appreciated as a dead composer than he was a living one.

“Ives tends to be dismissed a tinkerer, but he went to Yale and studied composition,” Belden said. “He understood that world. He just didn’t want to stay in it that long. “